Go/No-Go Checklist: 10 Questions Before You Bid

Why Most Bid/No-Go Calls Go Wrong

Most small teams don't skip the go/no-go decision, they just make it badly. The default answer to "should we bid this?" quietly becomes yes, because saying no feels like leaving money on the table, and nobody wants to be the person who killed a deal the boss liked the look of. The result is a pipeline stuffed with tenders you were never realistically going to win, each one pulling capacity away from the ones you could.

The fix isn't a gut feeling, it's a specific list of questions applied consistently, before the pull of a big contract number takes over. A mandatory requirement you can't meet doesn't become meetable because the opportunity looks good: missing even one mandatory criterion is enough to get a bid found non-compliant and set aside, no matter how strong the rest of the proposal reads. That's the discipline a checklist enforces: answer the hard questions on day one, not after the writing is already underway.

The 10-Question Go/No-Go Checklist

Run through these before you commit a single hour to writing.

Can you meet every mandatory criterion, literally, not almost? Mandatory means pass/fail. A rated criterion you score poorly on costs you points; a mandatory one you miss costs you the bid entirely, no matter how strong the rest of your proposal reads.

Do you already have the specific past-performance evidence the evaluation grid asks for? Not similar work, not "we could probably find it" — the actual contract references, dollar values, and scope descriptions the RFP wants, in a format you can produce before closing. This is fast to check if your past proposals and reference letters are organized and searchable, and painfully slow if they're scattered across old email threads and someone's laptop; [Awardly's Organization Library](https://awardly.ca) exists to make this a search instead of an excavation.

Is the required security clearance level actually achievable on this timeline? If the solicitation calls for Secret and your team holds nothing higher than Reliability Status, with no runway for a provisional clearance request before the deadline, that's a mandatory requirement you can't meet no matter how good your technical approach is.

Does your team have the actual hours to write a competitive proposal before closing? Compare the realistic writing effort against your calendar, not your optimism. A rushed response to a complex RFP usually loses to a mediocre response with three extra days of polish.

Are you eligible under this specific solicitation's rules? Trade-agreement coverage, Buy Canadian content thresholds, and set-aside eligibility (Indigenous procurement, for example) vary by solicitation, not by category. Read the actual clause, don't assume based on a similar contract you won before.

Is there an incumbent, and what would it really take to displace them? An incumbent bidder already has the relationship, the institutional knowledge, and often a pricing advantage from amortized setup costs. Bidding against one isn't disqualifying, but it should change your price and your win-theme, not just your enthusiasm.

Do the insurance, bonding, and financial requirements match what you can actually secure before submission, and are they proportionate to the contract's size? A liability minimum sized for a multi-million-dollar project sitting on a modest services contract is worth a direct question to the contracting authority before you assume you're locked out.

Does the rated-criteria weighting favor strengths you actually have? If price carries most of the score and your margin is already thin, winning may cost you more than losing would.

Do you need a teaming partner or subcontractor to meet a mandatory requirement, and is there time to lock in that agreement before submission? A verbal "they're in" isn't a signed teaming agreement, and evaluators can ask for proof.

If you win this exact contract, at this exact price, can you deliver it without losing money or your reputation? This is the question that matters most and gets skipped most often, because by the time you're pricing a bid, the sunk cost of writing it is already pulling you toward yes.

How Do You Actually Use This Before a Deadline?

A checklist that sits in a shared drive and never gets opened doesn't help you. Three practical rules make it actually work.

Decide within 48 hours of a solicitation posting, not the week before it closes. The earlier you kill a bad bid, the more capacity you free up for a good one, and the more runway you leave to fix a fixable problem, like starting a provisional security clearance request or lining up a teaming partner.

Don't let one person make the call alone, especially not the person most excited about the contract value. A second reader whose job is specifically to find reasons not to bid catches the mandatory-criteria miss and the unrealistic timeline that enthusiasm talks past.

Revisit the call if the answer to any single question changes. A go/no-go decision made on day one isn't binding forever. If you learn mid-proposal that a mandatory requirement is unmeetable, or a teaming partner falls through, that's a new no, not a sunk cost to write around.

When Is 'No' the Right Answer?

The honest failure mode of skipping this discipline isn't losing a bid, it's spending three weeks of a small team's limited capacity on a bid you were always going to lose, capacity that could have gone toward a contract you could actually win. Every hour spent on a doomed proposal is an hour not spent on tender research, relationship-building with a buyer, or writing a stronger response to something winnable.

"No" is the right answer whenever a mandatory requirement is genuinely unmeetable, when the timeline doesn't leave room for a competitive response, or when winning at the required price would mean delivering at a loss. None of those are failures of nerve; they're the checklist doing its job.

Running ten questions against every solicitation that lands is tedious to do consistently by hand, especially across a busy tender feed. [Awardly's Go/No-Go Analysis](https://awardly.ca) reads the full solicitation against the evaluation grid and returns a plain-language verdict, a win-probability estimate, and the specific watch-outs, before you assign a writer — the same job this checklist does, just before you've spent the time doing it manually.

Sources & Further Reading

This piece is strategic guidance built on established Canadian federal procurement mechanics rather than a specific news announcement, so treat the following as background reading rather than a citation for every claim above:

CanadaBuys Buyer's Guide, "Choose the method of supply": https://canadabuys.canada.ca/en/buyer-s-portal/buyer-s-guide/plan/determine-procurement-strategy/choose-method-supply

CanadaBuys, "Standing offers and supply arrangements" (for related evaluation-criteria context): https://canadabuys.canada.ca/en/tender-opportunities/standing-offers-and-supply-arrangements

Office of the Procurement Ombudsman: https://opo-boa.gc.ca

Mandatory and rated criteria, bonding and insurance thresholds, and set-aside eligibility all vary by solicitation. Confirm the specifics of any given tender against its own governing documents before you decide to bid.